You're exactly right. I was asked some of these exact questions yesterday. The guy should have realised what he was dealing with, the recruiters don't claim to be technical, and the questions are flagged as being straight forward pre screen questions.
Another potential revenue generator for Magic, partner with large organisations so they can offer the service to their employees. If the global corporation where I work can trust files of thousands of employees to a third party cloud sync service, I'm sure this can be done.
While I agree that it's ridiculous that this is the case, I side with the students who were given a choice and chose the physical calculator. The thought of doing Numerical Analysis problems and long calculations on an app sounds excruciating, and I know that Accounting classes would have taken an order of magnitude longer without tactile feedback.
The replacement for a $100 problem is to buy students iPads and use an app and touchscreen? That's not a viable solution whatsoever for the vast majority of schools. The real solution is for schools to simply advocate using a cheaper and similarly functioned calculator. I used a Casio EL531 all through school and college and while it didn't graph, it covered me for everything in an Engineering degree.
Maybe TI should upgrade the processor in it a bit? Put a better screen? Maybe one based on e-ink? Imagine a LISP machine with dedicated calculator buttons, the size of a small kindle.
An iPad with an app is not the solution, but how come graphing calculators haven't advanced at all.
They DO have vastly improved and modernized calculators. The Nspire line has fast processors, lots of storage, bright color screens, touch capability, greatly improved software, etc. They don't really even cost more than the "old school" TI graphing calculators. TI can really only be blamed for not dropping the price on their old models. It would be misleading to suggest that TI hasn't worked on more advanced calculators.
Aside from the color screen and faster processor, these new Nspire calculators have no new features except gimmicky stuff (No one is going to buy a calculator because they need a 2"x2" spreadsheet). Even my TI-89, which I bought in 1999, has the same basic functionality. (Maybe that's why the TI-89's price hasn't changed -- it costs as much as the Nspire CAS). The only truly useful improvement TI has made is a rechargeable battery pack.
The NSpire OS is significantly more usable than the 83+ and 89 that I went through school with. In one case, I was able to put a dataset acquired from measurements into the spreadsheet editor, run a linear regression, get the r^2 for the regression, then draw the graph of points and line and save it in just a few seconds of menu choices - without ever having done that on an NSpire before. This would have taken me significantly longer on the older models if I hadn't already memorized the procedure.
So I wouldn't say that the NSpire has any radically new features, but I think that it's a lot more approachable then the older models. It feels less like something that you have to specifically learn to use and more like an intuitive software package - which is perhaps what our author is really getting at when they talk about apps.
> but how come graphing calculators haven't advanced at all.
They don't really need to so there is little commercial reason to develop better models. The old TI-81/TI-83 designs are still perfectly sufficient for the courses to a certainly level, and above that you need something much more than just a bit improved so you can run chunky software like matlab. There isn't really much of an exploitable niche in between.
> The replacement for a $100 problem is to buy students iPads and use an app and touchscreen?
When put exactly that way, yes that sounds silly.
But what about an app and a stack of much cheaper tablets? Not one per child but a pool for the school which are available to use in lesson time, exam time, and for the less well-off students to be borrowed for homework. Those that have their own Android tablet can just use their own and run the app on that, just needing a school one for exams (where they would not be allowed their own because they could bring notes into a closed-book exam).
For exam use they'd need to be locked down but that should be easy enough. Require that all students use a school provided one (so they can't hide notes and other such on their own devices) and re-image each before the exams start (so yes, some admin time to factor in here) with a base OS plus the desired app and all wireless locked off.
I mentioned Android above for cheapness mainly, if you are going to target one platform then for this use the one you can get the least expensive units for should win. Having said that, you don't need to go the native app route: build it in JS and you can run it on any device. For what the students will be needing even those cheap god-awful-slow tablets will cope quite nicely unless your JS and DOM manipulations are grossly inefficient. For the locked-down situation in an exam room "run" the app from local files and use the local storage options in the browser if you need to maintain state.
There would be an up-front cost (buying a job lot of tablets initially) and ongoing maintenance (a rolling program of replacing them as they break and some admin time updating/resetting them as needed) but you can get easily get 7" tablets for less than $50 each as single units and that price should drop when buying in bulk. For a smaller device something like https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598272670/chip-the-wor... might be more suitable (smaller screen but easier to pocket and has physical keyboard) when they are available.
And of course the schools don't have to provide them, if they already expect the students to have a TI calculator how is requiring them to have a cheap tablet or similar any different?
The key problems with this idea as I see it:
* Getting the new app-and-devices idea accepted as a viable alternative (the current graphing calculators are pretty entrenched).
* Writing the app in the first place, and then maintaining it. I doubt there would be a commercial impetus for anyone to do it so it would need to be some form of F/OSS arrangement or funded from education budgets. Maybe if I win the lottery and need a project to fill my spare time with I'll give it a go...
They are entrenched but there's also a lot of reasons that they've stuck around too beyond the inertia of the education system. Any alternative is fighting against a lot of we established training and knowledge. Teachers have been using them for years and the functions are well known and pretty easy to figure out.
TI graphing calculators just work in a way that will be really hard to match with more complex or newer devices like an Android Tablet running an app. The software has been ironed out over years of use and I can't remember ever causing a crash on my 83s or my 89. Plus there's no admin or reimaging required because anyone can go and reset the device to factory in a couple seconds before a test.
Don't discount their low power draw and instantly replaceable batteries either. TIs get weeks of use out of a pair of batteries and you know that they're getting low long before they run out so there's plenty of time to get replacement batteries. Compare that to any cheap Android tablet where 5 hours of active use kills it dead and it takes too much time to charge it back up before a test or class is over so you have to either a) replace it with a charged spare or b) get power to the kid's desk. That's a pretty big knock against having a pool of devices as an important component of testing or in class work.
Makes me wonder what can be done to prevent this from happening without making it a terrible experience from a user point of view. Maybe the solution would be to store a password for the debugger and ask for it on first usage.
It said the guys name in the subdomain that this was available on. I can only imagine how that guy must feel, worst thing that I can imagine happening as a dev.
We've all made stupid mistakes and not paid a price as high as this!
Mistakes happens. But it should not be possible to put production data in publicly accessible systems by mistake. Not without committing a criminal offense, at the very least.
Your customer data is your customers' data. It's not yours to toy with as you please.
Command line flag, environment variable or interactive prompt could help. Maybe the interactive shell should be enabled separately from debug itself, since some only use debug for the exceptions. It could also explicitly try to figure out if it's running in production mode by detecting WSGI, disabling setting app.debug in favor of app.run or when listening on 0.0.0.0 and if not block that make you use "public_debug" or whatever.
> explicitly try to figure out if it's running in production mode
Does not help. The cases I saw in the past were people putting Werkzeug's stuff behind ngrok, proxies, nginx in which cases it will all look like local requests.
I wouldn't assume people didn't read the docs so much as they made a mistake deploying (part of) a development setup to production. Security isn't an all or nothing thing, it's about having a good chance of doing the right thing. I think having to explicitly enable the interactive part, something that isn't really standard either, would be sensible e.g. app.run(debug=True, debug_shell=True). At least that would make people even more aware and limit the potential of incidents to those who actually use the feature.
It's not exactly uncommon that people leak errors, remote code execution is another level though. It doesn't hurt to be careful with such a feature.
I implemented a pin based system now. It prints a PIN on first usage in 8 hours to the terminal and you need to enter it to unlock the console. This is IP bound.
It's still only a way to prevent greater damage, you should still not run the debugger enabled in prod.
They use 'barebones' Clevo shells, which are then configured by different vendors.
I have a laptop based on W230SD and I'm very happy with it. It contains a proper i7, not the underpowered U model and also has a 3k screen, 2x mSATA slots and is easily upgradable in a 13.3" chassis.
Not may people realise just how underpowered the U processors are for any real CPU intensive work. 4xxxU i7 processors are on a par with 2xxxx mobile processors.
You sacrafice ultrabook thinness and some battery life, but the return is a very powerful, cheap, upgradable laptop.
I don't understand why they put the FN on the left. Maybe it's because Ctrl+Shift isn't that common a gesture for the general population, but switching them in the BIOS is the first thing I do.
They could though, your subscription is tied to a viewing card, which should be tied to your address. They could use firmware on the box to generate a modified pint glass based on that. It'd be a fun game of cat and mouse.
Nothing, but that's the risk of crowdfunding. At least in this case it was someone quite well known in the community with some sort of track record (flattr). Projects fail, and to be honest, it was always a possibility here with his legal problems.
